According to Nikita Bier, head of product, X reduces payments to accounts that “fill up the timeline” by accumulating clickbait and fast news.
Bier wrote on Saturday “(a)ll collectors’ fees have been reduced by 60% this cycle,” he said, adding that they will see a further 20% reduction in the next payment cycle. He also said that the Elon Musk-owned social network will “cut fees for regular feed posters who use ‘🚨BREAKING’ in every post.
“It became very clear: filling the timeline with 100’s of stolen reposts and clickbait and clicking real creators who are being suppressed every day and hurting the growth of new authors,” Bier said, adding: “X will never disrupt speech or reach – but we will not compensate for manipulation of the app or our users.”
Bier’s comments followed a series of conservative news accounts By writing that they received emails from X to report that their accounts have been demonetized.
Dominick McGee, who posts under the name Dom Lucre, he wrote“🔥🚨CRACK (…) I was the first creator to be demonetized on this platform and I was all year. I got it back and lost it without any understanding. How is this possible? I’m one of the hardest working creators on X.”
McGee’s account has 1.6 million followers on X. It first gained notoriety for publishing conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, and was temporarily banned in 2023 when X was banned and demonetized in 2024. he told The New York Times last year said he earns $55,000 a year from the platform.
In response to Bier’s post, McGee complained X seemed to be listening to “complaints from people who have no intention of creating in this program.” While he admits that announcing every post as breaking news would be “clickbait,” he said, “I post hundreds of times and very few people crack.” (Some X users disagree, adding a community note that he used the word “BREAKING” 91 times in the past week.)
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Other users claimed they were pressured by X An account named PoliMath posting“I guess I appreciate what Nikita is trying to do there, but I got paid the lowest in a long time, so I’m a little bummed that I somehow got caught in this ‘aggregators’ bucket.” In the account, while they admitted to having a paid partnership with Kalshi, they said they were “not an ‘aggregator’ by any stretch of the imagination.”
Bier’s comments came later A new round of discussion about the value of the X platformdata analyst and expert Nate Silver complains about how difficult it is to drive traffic to other websites from X. He too He pointed to the predominance of right-wing accounts in Xannouncing, “I guess I had some intuition about how bad it was, but hey, that’s what you get when the ecosystem is disrupted.”
Bier claimed that Silver’s information was inaccurate, and Musk called his posts “nonsense.” other analyses there is supported their claims.
